Organizing the Presidency

with .

Washington, D.C.

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1 The Evolving Modern Presidency 1

Evolution, ‒

2 A Composite Presidency 11

3 Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1933–1945 21

4 Harry S. Truman, 1945–1953 36

5 Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1953–1961 49

6 John F. Kennedy, 1961–1963 65

7 Lyndon B. Johnson, 1963–1969 78

8 Richard M. Nixon, 1969–1974 91Gerald R. Ford, 1974–1977

9 Jimmy Carter, 1977–1981 122Ronald W. Reagan, 1981–1989

10 George H. W. Bush, 1989–1993 146William J. Clinton, 1993–2001

11 George W. Bush, 2001– 164

Contents

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Redefining the Presidential Task

12 The White House/Cabinet Nexus 177

13 Toward a More Functional Presidency 198

A Advice for a President-Elect, 1976–1977 211

B Transition Planning, 1980 235

Notes 243

Index 271

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This study examines the ways modern presidentshave organized their administrations. Primarily itconcerns the White House staff and secondarily

those other avenues of advice—the Executive Office, the cabinet, the vicepresident, outsiders—on which presidents rely. The next chapter describesthe context in which presidents work from the vantage point of those whohave been president. It provides a frame of reference for the subsequent dis-cussion of presidential administrations from Franklin Roosevelt’s to GeorgeW. Bush’s and why presidents have acted the way they have in handlingsuch common duties as personnel selection, congressional relations, pressrelations, speechwriting, information gathering, and relations with theircabinets and between their department heads and White House assistants.

Presidents before Franklin Roosevelt did not run or manage the execu-tive branch from the White House, at least not in the sense that a chiefexecutive officer runs or manages a corporation. During Roosevelt’s firsttwo terms, the White House staff was structured to serve his personalneeds. It was considerably bigger though not significantly different fromthat of his predecessors. Because Roosevelt, in the manner of his cousinTheodore, conceived of the presidency as a “bully pulpit,” his assistants weremostly engaged in helping him try to shape public opinion.

There was no National Security Council or National Economic Councilwith responsibilities for departmental oversight. There was no congressional

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relations office in the White House. Presidential assistants were consideredutility infielders who were moved from one position to another as needed oras the president’s fancy dictated.

While Roosevelt did not seek collective counsel from his cabinet, thecabinet officers still had the major responsibility for running their depart-ments, drafting legislation, and lobbying it through Congress. At the sametime, however, Roosevelt created myriad new agencies, reporting directly tohim, that impinged on the jurisdiction of the cabinet departments.

During Roosevelt’s third term some independent power bases wereestablished on the White House staff. Subtly, the direction of decision-making changed. Certain major policies began to be devised in the WhiteHouse offices of intimate advisers who frequently assumed the prerogativesof the department heads.

The new Executive Office of the President, created in 1939, vastly ex-panded Roosevelt’s outreach, and he began to see a president’s task as beingchief manager of the executive branch. This alteration was crucial. Roose-velt lived in the White House for twelve years, during which the UnitedStates fought a great depression and a great war. As those events encour-aged the growth of the central government, his long tenure meant that toan unusual degree his response to that growth and his distinctive styleshaped the concept of the office of president. Thus by the time of his deathin 1945, most of the elements of the modern presidency were in place, evenif in embryonic form. The president, rather than Congress, had clearlybecome the center of federal attention.

Under Harry Truman, the atomization of the White House—the sepa-ration of staff by function—assumed modest momentum. While most ofhis assistants, like Roosevelt’s, were generalists, some handled such specificassignments as labor-management relations or congressional liaison.Hierarchies also started to take shape as top presidential aides began to takeon assistants of their own, precedents for the fiefdoms that later character-ized the White House.

The distinction between cabinet officers, who advocated policy, andWhite House staff, who provided the president with personal services, wasfurther obscured in Truman’s administration. Moreover, the success ofClark Clifford, Truman’s chief counsel, as the main architect of the FairDeal, illustrated that proximity to the president was a blessing of no smallvalue. The theoretical line between the institutional and personal presiden-

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cies that separated the Executive Office from the White House also becamemore blurred as the Bureau of the Budget provided staff and services forpresidential assistants. At the same time, two major units, the Council ofEconomic Advisers and the National Security Council, joined the WhiteHouse complex, each giving the president a capability for overseeingimportant government activities that was not totally dependent on thedepartments.

The assimilation of power in the White House continued, if a bit moreslowly, under Dwight Eisenhower. Having spent most of his life in the mil-itary, Eisenhower organized the White House along stricter lines that hefound more familiar and congenial. He surrounded himself with a staff sec-retariat in charge of the flow of papers to and from the Oval Office and asecretariat in charge of the machinery of cabinet meetings. Experts ratherthan generalists advised on questions he felt were inadequately handled bythe departments. An elaborate apparatus was invented to coordinatenational security affairs, and a full-scale congressional relations office wasadded to the White House. Eisenhower’s press secretary devised moresophisticated techniques for controlling the flow of news. A chief of staffwas now responsible for the proper functioning of all these new offices,which had increased the size of the White House but not its operationalcapability. Eisenhower still expected cabinet officers to run their depart-ments with a minimum of second-guessing from his staff.

John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson scuttled much of the machinerythey found in the White House because they were told that it was unsuitedto the needs of an activist liberal administration and because it made themuncomfortable. Yet even without the paraphernalia of staff and cabinet sec-retariats, a chief of staff ’s office, and an overblown National Security Coun-cil, the president’s personal staff, Executive Office units, and presidentialcouncils continued to grow. Because both presidents wanted government todo more faster, agencies such as the Office of Economic Opportunity wereplaced directly under the presidential umbrella.

A consequence of the trend toward more direct White House involve-ment in department operations was that presidential aides sometimes issuedinstructions to cabinet officers’ subordinates. This reflected Kennedy’s lackof interest in organizational maintenance, the energy and impatience of hisWhite House staff, and his conception of the presidential office as the mov-ing force of government. By the time the Johnson administration was fully

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active, “the White House was no longer an antiseptic shrine where highpolicy was formulated and promulgated in dignity”; it had become, for thefirst time, “the operational center” of the executive branch.1

The Rooseveltian model as adapted by Kennedy attracted some superiorpeople to Washington, raised the level of debate on such issues as civilrights and disarmament, and produced several government initiatives. Butthe model seemed to have developed flaws. Kennedy took the nation on aroller coaster ride of failures and successes—the Bay of Pigs invasion andthe Cuban missile crisis—and when the presidency was inherited byJohnson, who retained most of his predecessor’s advisers and who sharedKennedy’s faith in the Rooseveltian model, the result was a string of stun-ning legislative triumphs and massive involvement in Vietnam.

By Johnson’s time, the advantages of the personalized presidency andthe centralized presidency had been well documented. Now the liabilitiesbegan to come under serious questioning. The personalized presidencylargely depends on the president’s ability to mobilize public opinion to putpressure on the government to perform as he desires and to support what hebelieves is right. If the president lacks this skill or if his vision of “right” isflawed, he cannot compensate for long by relying on the inherent strengthof the office. The centralized presidency largely depends on the president’sability to keep lines open to those outside his immediate circle and to resistminutiae. If he is suspicious of cabinet members and relies too heavily onoverworked assistants, he is apt to lose perspective and even his sense ofreality. Such were the problems that would plague the Nixon presidency.

When Richard Nixon succeeded Johnson he became the first activistconservative president. In the White House, party and ideology hadchanged, but the direction of the personalized and centralized presidencyhad not. There was, however, an essential difference in style. Even when theVietnam protest limited his mobility, Johnson had quested for contactsbeyond the confines of the White House; Nixon sought isolation. He struc-tured his White House staff to limit his associations to those with whom hefelt most comfortable, his most loyal aides over whom he had greatest con-trol. In the end, this Greta Garbo conception of the presidency provedunsuited to democratic leadership. But even putting aside the character ofRichard Nixon and the question of how precedents, when pushed beyondthe limits of legality, contributed importantly to Watergate and the resig-nation of a president, Nixon’s mode of operating illustrated the difficulties

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of running the government through an overly personalized, centralizedWhite House command post, a problem that in varying degrees hasplagued the presidents who followed him.2

The nine chapters on the administrations of Roosevelt II through BushII trace the development of four characteristics of the modern presidency.

The first is its prodigious growth. By the time Richard Nixon left officethe number of people employed by the White House and the ExecutiveOffice was nearly twice that under Johnson, just as Johnson’s staff was nearlytwice that of Roosevelt’s. In sixty-seven years the White House staff hasgrown from thirty-seven to more than one thousand, the Executive Officestaff from zero to many thousands.3 With the bureaucratizing of the presi-dency, it is hardly surprising that the White House fell heir to all the prob-lems of a bureaucracy, including the distortion of information as it passesthrough the chain of command and frustrating delays in decisionmaking.

The modern presidency has also been witness to presidents’ increasingsuspicion of the permanent government. This has led to a proliferation offunctional offices within the White House and to a White House that car-ries out plans because the president does not trust the bureaucracy to do so.Blaming the bureaucracy is an easy way to gloss over the failures of govern-ment, yet trying to run a government without its support is like trying torun a train without an engine.

Another characteristic of the modern presidency is the rising influenceof White House staff members on the president and the correspondingdecline in cabinet influence. This has meant a serious separation of policyformulation from policy implementation. It also may have created moreidiosyncratic policy, since White House aides often operate with fewer con-straints and less feel for what can be achieved.

The fourth characteristic is that presidential assistants have increasinglybecome special pleaders. This trend began benignly enough when Trumangave an aide responsibility for minority group affairs, in a sense creating apresidential spokesman for those who were otherwise underrepresented inthe councils of government. Each successive president added other repre-sentatives, until under Nixon there were White House assistants for theaged, youth, women, blacks, Jews, labor, Hispanic-Americans, the businesscommunity, governors and mayors, artists, and citizens of the District ofColumbia, as well as such concerns as drug abuse, energy, environment,physical fitness, volunteerism, telecommunications, and national goals.

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Where once the White House had been a mediator of interests, it now hadbecome a collection of interests.

Ultimately the modern presidency has moved toward creating all policyat the White House, overseeing the operations of government from theWhite House, using White House staff to operate programs of high pres-idential priority, and representing in the White House all interests that aredemographically separable. This attempt can never succeed. Even an over-blown White House staff is simply too inadequate a fulcrum for moving theweight of the executive branch, which employs nearly 5 million people andspends over 2 trillion dollars annually.

In the final chapters of this study I propose a redefinition of the tasks ofpresidents, those activities that they must perform and that cannot be per-formed by others. The corollary is that the many other tasks currently per-formed badly by presidents must be performed elsewhere. My contention isthat, starting with Roosevelt, presidents have made a serious mistake inasserting that they are the chief managers of the federal government. It ishard to find firm support for such an assertion in the Constitution. In fact,except in the case of the secretary of state and in certain emergency legisla-tion, Congress gives the authority to run programs directly to departmentheads, not to the president to be redelegated to department heads.

Rather than chief manager, the president is chief political officer of theUnited States. His major responsibility, in my judgment, is each year tomake a relatively small number of highly significant political decisions—among them setting national priorities, which he does through the budgetand his legislative proposals, and devising policy to ensure the security ofthe country, with special attention to those situations that could involve thenation in war.4

Agreed, this is a considerably more modest definition of the presidencythan national leaders and some scholars have led Americans to expect, andit does not guarantee that U.S. leaders will always make wise decisions. Itis also a definition that may warrant rethinking at some future time andunder different circumstances. For now, however, it is a definition for pres-idential conduct that is apt to provide more effective government services,fewer unfulfilled promises, and less alienation in our society.

To the extent that presidents undermine confidence in the presidency byburdening the White House staff beyond its capacity to effect change anddeliver services, a different set of reciprocal relationships between presi-

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dents, presidential staffs, and cabinet members must be devised. The finalchapters of this study seek ways to arrive at a more functional presidency.These ideas do not relate to ideology: a liberal or a conservative presidentcould operate equally well within this framework with markedly differentresults. My task is to make the case that these arrangements are both nec-essary and feasible.

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